Managing your time

• Admin
• Fri Jul 23, 2021

Once you complete reading this book, you will understand two important things. One, you have lots of things to be done during your graduation to be successful. Two, you have your 3-4 years of time period to work towards your foundation for your entire career and life. Your time is going to be precious resource then ever. You will have to manage your time productively, so that you make the best use of it.

The first and foremost thing you will need to understand is that there is always 24 hours a day. Time doesn’t change for anyone. Whatever we organize and schedule ourself, this is not going to change. The secret is on we identify what we can do this this 24 hours.

You can manage your time well by following the seven tips which is widely accepted by management gurus.

Identifying Time wasters – Most of us fall prey to the so called time wasters. While we think , we are doing things productively, may times, we end up wasting time in few things. For example; we start surfing internet for a purpose but we end up going to multiple links those are not related to our search goal. We waste a lot of time reading and analysing unwanted information for that point in time. Some of us may be wasting lots of time in travel without doing anything. One of my friend is a super fan of audio books which he completes a book in a week, just in his travel to college every day.

Building your Schedule – The most important aspect is to build your daily and weekly schedule based on our long term and short term goals. Writing down the schedules will make you jot down and remember your assignments of the week, your activities towards your semester project, or your focus on final examination etc.. While you list everything, that helps you to allot time for everything that is important to you. Have your to-do list of the day, which you will review every day before going to bed.

Creating routines – There are certain things you will be doing every day. Those things should be created as a routine, thereby your time is taken care. This includes exercising, learning, internet surfing and career development activity, which you will be doing on a daily basis. Create this routine on the beginning of every semester. You may have to fit in your goals based on the subjects and activities of the semester.

Smaller Tasks - Many times we get overwhelmed by the size of goal that we have. For example, while I was in my third semester of graduation , statistics was a nightmare for me. The syllabus and the size of book itself was scary. Based on the advise of my mentor, I had spitted the entire syllabus into a 120 learning units. I focused learning one lesson unit a day. By doing this it looked smaller goal and I was able to cross the bridge with decent scores in that semester. Similarly you will have lots of such hard and big goals. By splitting them into small activities and placing them in your to-do list of the day, you get across easily.

Focusing one at a time – Often we tend to believe , we are a multi tasker. But the reality is only 2% are strong multi taskers and the remaining 98% of people are not capable of handling multi-tasking resulting in wasting their productivity. It is always good to focus on one thing at a time. Having a deeper focus will ensure productivity in that specific task.

Using technology wisely – There are lots of mobile apps and tools that help us manage our time. You can use a online scheduler, daily to do list application, calendars etc., But always remember, technology can make you fall on an unintended trap of defocusing yourself.

Apart from above tips, you can manage your time better by getting up early, ensuring you have SMART goals, identifying your important tasks, blocking distractions, taking breaks to rejuvenate over the day, and getting right 8 hours of sleep every day.